FPGA-based Implementation of Signal Processing Systems

14

Final Statements

14.1 Introduction

The book has outlined many of the techniques needed to create FPGA solutions for DSP systems. Some of these have been encapsulated within the design tools and then applied to a number of design examples. In addition to achieving efficient FPGA implementations in terms of area, speed and throughput rates, the book has also covered the key area of low-power implementations, briefly covering a number of techniques to reduce the dynamic power consumption. The key of these approaches was to derive an efficient circuit architecture which successfully utilized the underlying resources of the FPGA to best match the computational and communication requirements of the applications. Typically, this involved using high levels of parallelism and pipelining.

If FPGA-based DSP system implementation is to be successfully automated, this requires incorporation of the tools described in Chapter 9, either within commerical HDL-based or C-based design tools (as is beginning to happen with the Synplify DSP tools), or within higher-level design environments such as those outlined in Chapter 11. If this is to be successful, then any high-level approach should allow designers to create efficient FPGA implementations from high-level descriptions, and/or to incorporate existing IP cores, as this may represent considerable years of design time, within the high-level design flow.

The purpose of this chapter is to give some attention to issues which have either had to ...